Wolters Kluwer
Simplifying End-to-End Contract Lifecycle Management

One of the foundations of business, contract lifecycle management has remained relatively untouched by technology in many organizations. While proper contract management can pave the way for greater profitability in the long run, a simple overlooked technicality can result in losses amounting to millions. The overdependence on manual contract lifecycle management (CLM) processes introduces unnecessary risks and leads to negative bottom line impacts. Wolters Kluwer, a leading global provider of information services and solutions is committed to helping clients improve business processes and solve complex problems. Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions is the market-leading global provider of enterprise legal spend and matter management, contract lifecycle management and legal analytics solutions. The company’s CLM Matrix, an end-to-end CLM solution, helps companies manage their contracts, trade agreements, and other important documents effectively through automated workflows.

“At its core, CLM Matrix is a data repository for contracts that a corporate entity has to manage,” says Barry Ader, VP, product management at Wolters Kluwer’s ELM Solutions. CLM Matrix establishes consistent contract storage practices and allows legal departments to gain visibility into their corporate obligations and risks associated with their contracts. As any contract set up by an organization involves several steps before the final approval, CLM Matrix’s easy-to-use features are designed to boost the bottom line by enabling organizations to remove bottlenecks and accelerate time to revenue with easy workflow automation design and status transparency. The solution facilitates standardized and pre-approved clauses, which shorten time to contract closure. This frees up legal resources with fast, compliant, and simple contract creation that ensures the use of pre-approved legal language. Further, CLM Matrix mitigates the risk of fines and revenue leakage with actionable, right-person, right-time obligation management alerts.

While implementing a CLM system, one of the first steps involves identifying the right contracts, clauses, and workflows that need to be put in place. For this reason, Wolters Kluwer performs a proper assessment to understand a client’s environment, workflows, and other processes to determine what they are looking to achieve. “Our consultative approach takes into account a client’s goals and integration with existing software solutions before developing an implementation plan that facilitates CLM workflow automation,” explains Ader.

Citing a real scenario, Ader mentions how a Florida-based environmental regulatory agency required a CLM system with flexible workflow functionality. The client’s manual CLM system combined with a dispersed workforce and frequent team travel contributed to weeks-long processes. CLM Matrix enabled a transition to digital CLM and shortened the processes to days or minutes from weeks, providing a secure contract repository with role-based access. Remote teams were also able to take advantage of anytime, anywhere approvals to remove bottlenecks. The client’s need to maintain compliance with public policy was also fulfilled by CLM Matrix’s configurable and automated workflows that allowed for adjustments through an intuitive interface. Finally, CLM Matrix also delivered complete transparency through its role-based dashboards that provide both contract status and real-time data necessary for making business decisions.

Wolters Kluwer differentiates itself from the contract management competition with its commitment to a customer-first mentality and easy-to-use solutions that can be rapidly implemented and modified according to a client’s unique need. Moving forward, Wolters Kluwer plans to strengthen the CLM Matrix platform’s integration potential to create connected workflows that further streamline CLM processes. Moreover, the latest version of the CLM Matrix features a redesigned user interface, which makes it more intuitive and allows the contract workflow to operate at a much quicker pace. Through its deep-domain expertise in transformative legal technology, Wolters Kluwer helps customers make better decisions within the legal operations workflow.